"This document outlines the set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under the Linux operating system according to those of the FSSTND v2.3 final (January 29, 2004) and also its actual implementation on an arbitrary system. It is meant to be accessible to all members of the Linux community, be distribution independent and is intended to discuss the impact of the FSSTND and how it has managed to increase the efficiency of support interoperability of applications, system administration tools, development tools, and scripts as well as greater uniformity of documentation for these systems."

We have to start somewhere, but I fear that those links will have to stay for the next 20 yeas.

The good thing is all that mess is on the root partition, which doesn't interest users that much. Mounting is no longer a problem (even media and mnt dirs are no longer required, since it goes to /run/mount/username now), /dev is maintaned by udev and /home is often on another partition. Only /etc is still going to be important and it's mess, but so much software depends on that mess, that is impossible to solve this.

We have to start somewhere, but I fear that those links will have to stay for the next 20 yeas.

The /lib and /sbin links could probably be removed without much fuss - there's little software that actually cares about those directories specifically.

The tricky one is /bin, since there's a billion scripts out there starting with #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/perl that would need to be modified for it to work. Not to mention tools (like autotools, for instance) that *generate* such scripts.

Main goal is to have one less directories for "exe" files, and generally more clean /. There's too much in there now. I can leave with /etc, /usr, /home, /boot, but /srv, /mnt&/media, /bin&/sbin, /opt? I rarely even look inside of those, so why they are exposed so much? I simply type something in terminal (or #!/usr/bin/env) and hoping that PATH in shell config is OK. Or plug usb memory stick and click the icon.

I wonder if ever we'll have one dir for binaries in Linux and throw PATH away.